Social studies teachers…
May 03, 2008 in Education
A constitution/current events on this story practically writes itself. You’re welcome.
Archive for May 3rd, 2008
This Week in Media Consumption
May 03, 2008 in Comics, Games, Movies, TV
Comics:
- Blue Beetle #26 - A nearly all Spanish issue, and a delightful story that I (mostly) was able to understand
- DCU #0 - a decent introduction to the DC universe as of RIGHT NOW before things go crazy in Final Crisis
- Immortal Iron Fist #14 - if they ever get around to making that Iron Fist movie, it should be just like this.
- New Avengers #40 - Rewind to past events we glimpsed or had some ideas about from before and get a clearer picture of how the Secret Invasion started
- Thor Ages of Thunder - this book was beautiful and touched my mythology nerd core in all the right places
- American Way - I bought this trade at New York Comic Con for cheap based on vaguely remembering some internet recommendations, and I was not disappointed. It’s a real world approach to superheroes, placing them in the midst of the civil rights upheavals of the sixties.
- Iron Man: Demon in a Bottle - I was at Borders and saw a copy of this opened on the shelf, so I took the opportunity to sit down and read it before the movie came out this week. It’s a 30 year old story, and it’s great. It was also pretty shocking at one point.
TV:
- How I Met Your Mother - some decent fallout from last week which could lead to some shift in the characters
- House - Nice joke played on the peons this week.
Movies:
- Iron Man - Awesome. Great summer popcorn flick.
Games:
- Just Cause - I wrapped this game up. It was actually a pretty cool ending that made use of the stunt system nicely. As I said before, a decent enough $15 game, but not much more than that. Clocked time, 25 hours or so, but you could do all of the story missions in under 5 hours easily if you don’t run around liberating villages, finding collectibles, and doing sidemissions.
- Mario Kart Wii - I’m really liking this so far. Beth also enjoys it. She plays with the steering wheel, while I prefer the wiimote + nunchuck.
Comics in school
May 03, 2008 in Comics, Education
In celebration of Free Comic Book Day, here’s a nice bit from Tom Brevoort’s blog. A teacher in an inner city middle school recently wrote to him to let him know he recently started a comic book club. My favorite bit is that even with it just being an informal after school gathering, the teacher still planned a lesson. He took the time to get them hooked and present them with relevant background knowledge before diving in to the reading material of the day:
We watched the web trailer for Secret Invasion, I went through a powerpoint presentation of some of the main characters from the story, and then I gave away a half dozen of Secret Invasion (the reprints that came out today) that I bought for them, and we read it.
In my classroom, I have a few of the Marvel Essentials books. My lowest level readers especially love them, as the pictures provide a lot of context so they can actually look at a story and at least get a rough idea of the events happening. They also love to trace and try to mimic the art in the books, so there’s a lot of crudish representations of Kirby art floating around my room some days.
Between this story and all the techie goodness from yesterday, it warms my heart to see so many teachers doing plenty of interesting things with stuff kids actually relate to.
Update 4:00 I hit a couple of comics shops, Showcase Comics in Bryn Mawr and Effin Comics in Drexel Hill and got the following loot for my students:
Update May 5: Gave them to my kids today, they loved them. I let them pick out one at a time until they were mostly gone. Anything Iron Man was a big hit after the movie this weekend, with Spidey and X-Men following close. One of my Disney-obsessed autistic students was able to get all three of the Disney comics, and my lone female student took Mickey Mouse, then was confused, so she took Owly and Little Archie on my suggestion. One boy refused to take any comics. He said the paper is too thin. Kind of weird, especially since he’s my most artistically talented student.